“Please,” she said, and there was a world of pleading in that single word.
I shook my head. “He’s alive,” I said. “No one blames you for what happened. We all know you didn’t do this willingly. But I’m afraid I can’t let you rest yet.”
She blinked. Whatever response she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “He’s truly alive?”
“He’s alive,” I echoed. People who aren’t used to being knocked out by Doppelgangers and stuffed into closets sometimes need a little more reassurance when that kind of thing happens to them. For me and most of the people who spend any amount of time with me, this was sort of a best-case kidnapping. Nessa hadn’t been seriously hurt and neither had the High King. She’d just taken a stressful three-day nap.
Of course, two members of the guard were dead, and that was going to be heartbreaking for everyone who knew them, but I hadn’t. I could keep moving forward like this was any case, and I’ve found that when I do that, I tend to drag the investigation along behind me.
Nessa blinked again. “I thought . . . when that creature took me, I thought . . .”
“Near as I can guess, it was waiting for us to show up so that it could assassinate the High King with a known king-breaker in the knowe,” I said grimly. “No one with any sense would look at that situation and not believe we’d either smuggled the Doppelganger in with us or hired them in the first place—if people even believed there had been a Doppelganger. I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t forced the issue, the plan was to replace one of us during the day, and then have the Doppelganger perform the assassination while they looked like me, or May, or Stacy.”
Depending on how much the Doppelganger knew—which hadn’t been all that much, as such things went—it could have decided to target the Luidaeg, or even Oberon. I couldn’t quite decide whether that would have ended with Oberon locked in a supply closet, still unwilling to be anything more than a silent tagalong, or whether it would have ended with the King of Faerie returned and the Doppelganger in pieces all across the Eastern seaboard. Either way, it would have been a disaster, and I was incalculably relieved by my own inability to let anything go.
“Ah,” said Nessa. “I see. It may also have been waiting to see if you brought the Crown Prince with you.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I apologize if you didn’t know,” she said. “As I said before, the rumor in the knowe is that he was sent to the Mists, to place him as far from Toronto as possible while Their Majesties addressed the pressures that had demanded a fosterage to begin with. Further, the rumor states that he has been squired to begin his proper knightly training, and that he serves a king-breaker.”
“Huh,” I said. “Don’t know of any other king-breakers active in the Mists right now. We’re not the only Kingdom on the Pacific Coast, you know. He could be in Silences, or Angels, or shoveling cow shit on the Golden Shore. I brought my squire with me.” I gestured for Quentin to step forward, in all his faded Banshee glory.
Nessa looked at him without recognition, studying his face for a moment before she sighed and turned away. “Then the rumors were wrong,” she said. “But believing them may still have motivated the timing of this attack. Kill the Crown Prince and the High King at once—and change the course of a continent.”
“Um, isn’t the High Queen considered an equal ruler?” I asked. “And then there’s the little sister—she could inherit.”
“But not for years yet,” said Nessa. “If Quentin were to be killed, Penthea would require a regent to hold the throne, and war would surely follow, for those who seek power are not going to sit idly back while a little girl plays at being High Queen. And there are . . . aspects of the High Queen’s past that would preclude her taking the throne in the eyes of many of the same individuals.”
Meaning Nessa knew that Maida had been born a changeling, and even though she hadn’t been mortal in decades, maybe centuries, the prejudices in Faerie can run deep enough and be arbitrary enough to prevent a peaceful transfer of power. Kill the sitting King and his eldest heir, make sure the truth about the High Queen gets out, destabilize the Westlands.
I was going to have to give Quentin an extra slice of wedding cake to thank him for realizing he needed a new face if he was going to attend the wedding.
“But it’s all right, it didn’t happen, and October here is a hero and a busybody, meaning she’s going to do everything in her inconsiderable power to annoy whoever arranged your abduction into giving themselves up,” said the Luidaeg, soothingly. Nessa turned to look at her. “Now, where can we take you that you’ll feel safe? Your quarters are out of the question, I’m afraid. It’s going to take a while to clean and search them and verify that they’re safe.”
“Can I stay with you?” asked Nessa. “Please, I won’t be any trouble, I won’t ask for anything else if you allow it, but please . . .” She was looking at the Luidaeg the way the Roane did, eyes bright and wide and filled with depthless pleading, like this was the only thing she had ever really wanted in her entire life. Like the Luidaeg could make her dreams come true by saying yes.
The Luidaeg sighed. “I’m not your First,” she said. “I love you, but not the way she would. I don’t have that in me anymore for anyone who isn’t already mine. I’m sorry. I know how lost you have to feel, not knowing your beginnings, but I can’t be your harbor. You can stay with our group, for now, unless the High King calls you, but I can’t promise I’ll be there the whole time.”
Nessa nodded. “That will be . . . more than I have any right to have asked you for.” She bent until her forehead nearly brushed her knees. “Thank you,” she said, in a very small voice.
The Luidaeg grimaced. “And with that settled, Toby, we should get back to your room, both so you can help with searching it for traps, and so your kitty cat can see some actual proof that you’re not dead before he starts a diplomatic incident.”
I felt my eyes widen. That was something I hadn’t considered. If Tybalt lost his temper inside the seat of the Westlands . . . “Let’s go,” I said, standing hurriedly.
The Luidaeg smirked. “Yes,” she agreed, “let’s.”
eleven
Quentin getting back so quickly with the Luidaeg made more sense once we were in the hall and I started to understand the geography slightly better. From the storeroom where we’d found Nessa to the hallway where the guest quarters were linked was less than a ten-minute walk, and he hadn’t been walking. He’d been running as fast as his legs would carry him, anxious to resolve a bad situation that managed to touch on both sides of his life at the same time.
Poor kid. I’d always known my getting married in Toronto would be hard on him, but I hadn’t expected quite this level of difficulty.
Nessa held tight to the Luidaeg’s hand as we walked, ignoring the startled looks we got from passing locals. Anyone who knew her also knew what had happened, and clearly didn’t understand how she could be walking so calmly with a group of strangers. But as long as she was with the Luidaeg, she was calm, and we could use that.
The door to my temporary quarters was open, and voices, raised in argument, drifted out into the hall.
“—one good reason why I shouldn’t go and find her?” Tybalt sounded incredibly collected, almost calm, which didn’t match up with his volume, which had a strained quality that told me it had been creeping steadily upward for some time.
“Because you’ve just been elf-shot and you’re going to be wobbly for a while,” said Walther, reasonably. “If I didn’t carry the elf-shot counter whenever I was going anywhere with Toby, you’d still be unconscious while I finished brewing, so I think you can afford to take a little time to recover.”
“Because she’s fine,” said Raj, sounding bored. “She’s Toby. She’s always fine.”
Oh, I teach the worst lessons to my squires. Whether I mean to or not, I’m forever in the process of breaking the
m.
“Because the sea witch is with her, and that means we need to be more worried about everyone else in this knowe, and possibly everyone along this seaboard, than we are about the indestructible king-breaker,” said Nolan.
“Because the air says she’s right outside in the hall,” said Cassandra.
There was a pause. We walked a little faster.
Not fast enough: Tybalt appeared in the doorway, gripping the frame with one white-knuckled hand, clearly recovered from the elf-shot, although he was still paler than I liked. The strained look around his eyes was probably more attributable to me than being woken from a century-long sleep before the alarm went off, and I had a split second to feel bad about that before he was sighing my name like it was an undiscovered sonnet by Shakespeare and flinging himself the last few feet between us.
I braced for the collision, opening my arms, and when he slammed into me, it was a very mutual embrace, his arms locking around my torso and mine around his shoulders. He buried his face in the damp but drying tangle of my hair, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
“Come on, kid,” I heard the Luidaeg say to Nessa. “Let’s take you to meet the rest of this sideshow of ridiculous horrors. They’re going to be a few minutes.”
“I’ll see you inside,” said Quentin.
As soon as we were alone in the hall, Tybalt pulled back, sliding his hands up to press against the sides of my jaw as he studied my face. “You weren’t there,” he said. “The last thing I remembered was opening the shadows, and then sleep claimed me, and I had been pulling you with me to the other side, and I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
“You fell into shadow,” I said, voice soft. “Carrying me and Caitir. Candela can access the Shadow Roads on their own, and I can borrow magic from blood. I didn’t dare try yours, not with elf-shot in your system and your memories likely to make me lose control of your magic, and so I had to use hers to open us a gate out of the Shadow Roads. I’m not hurt. Out of the three of us, I’m the only one who wasn’t hurt.”
“I’m supposed to protect you,” he said, hiccupping with the effort of not sobbing. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against mine. “I’m supposed to protect you, and I let myself drop you in the dark, alone, with no way out.”
As afraid as I had always been of being stranded on the Shadow Roads, how much more afraid must he have been, knowing them the way he did, understanding them as intimately as only a King of Cats could. I reached up and gripped his wrists, holding his hands where they were.
“I got out,” I said, voice low. “You don’t always have to protect me, as long as you want to keep trying. The trying is what matters, and when we fell into the dark, I had two ways out. You, and her. I used her because it was safer for me, because I’m going to make it to our wedding.”
He laughed, a little unsteadily. “Am I?”
“Of course you are. You’re the King of Cats, and you’re my fiancé, and I think there’s a very good chance at this point that you’re my one true love.” I smiled at him, as earnestly as I could. “We’re going to be the sort of story people write ballads about, only we’re not going to end with either one of us lying in a shallow grave somewhere, because I flat-out refuse to let that be the last verse for us. You’re going to be at the wedding. You get to make me deal with whatever pureblood bullshit you’ve dredged out of your ancient books of etiquette, and see me in my wedding dress, which I know is going to be gorgeous, because you have much better taste in clothing than I do, and is also going to be covered in blood before the end of the ceremony—”
“I have already taken that into account,” he said, sounding much more composed.
“I knew you would. Now, are we good? This time, I didn’t run off and endanger myself without you.”
“No, I endangered you quite enough for the both of us.” His expression darkened a bit, but didn’t return to its earlier misery, and that was more than good enough for me.
“Excellent. So let’s go see how chaotic things are in our room—you didn’t think we’d have actual privacy before the wedding, did you?” I let go of his wrists. “You’re too smart to have made a mistake that massive.”
Tybalt scoffed and let me go, taking a step away before capturing my hand in his and pulling me along with him into the room where our friends—and Nessa—were waiting.
And boy howdy, were they waiting. They seemed to cover every available surface, making me feel abstractly as if I’d just walked into a drama club meeting from one of the terrible teen movies that Chelsea liked to co-opt my living room in order to watch. Her mother didn’t care for cinema of any kind, and Etienne apparently had a tendency to become completely enraptured by moving media, making him the binge-watcher to end all bingers. I thought that was hilarious, but apparently straining my friend’s marriage because I thought it was funny wasn’t appropriate, so the works of John Hughes and Kenny Ortega got to dominate my television instead of theirs.
Weirdly, Tybalt didn’t seem to mind the teen movie festival intermittently spinning up in our living room. When I’d asked him about it, he’d just laughed and said it was payback for the number of Shakespeare productions he made the kids sit through.
So walking into a scene from one of those movies was startling, but not as jarring as it could have been. The teenagers had claimed one of the short couches, the four of them piled on it like so many puppies, personal space forgotten in their rush to make sure no one sat on the floor. Raj hadn’t bothered switching to cat form before sprawling across Quentin and Dean’s laps, while Chelsea was perched on the back of the couch with one leg over each sitting boy’s shoulders, twisting a lock of Quentin’s hair between her fingers.
Walther and Nolan, on the other hand, were both on the floor, Walther slouched and Nolan as ramrod straight as if he were settled in a proper throne. Cassandra, interestingly enough, wasn’t sitting with her boyfriend; instead, she and her mother were sitting on another of the short couches. Kerry was bustling around the room, offering cookies to anyone who didn’t already have one. Which was everyone, meaning either the cookies had just come out or they were really, really good.
May and Jazz were standing, leaning against each other, both blessedly awake. Nessa and the Luidaeg were already seated on the last of the short couches, Nessa leaning into the sea witch like she knew no other comfort in this world. Oberon was leaning against the wall between the two couches, still in his nondescript “I don’t matter, don’t pay attention to me” guise. They all looked around when Tybalt and I stepped inside, and I offered them a wan smile.
“Um,” I said. “Hey.”
“October Christine Daye,” said Stacy, voice getting louder with each passing syllable. She stood, Cassandra leaning to the side to clear her way, and strode toward me, jabbing a finger at my chest. “What. Did you do. To that dress?!”
“Um.” It didn’t feel like a question with any good answers. Plus there were so many of them. “I got it wet? And cold? And I think maybe I bled on it a little . . .”
Quentin made a stifled choking noise. I glanced at him. “A little?” he asked. “Toby, you had a whole knife sticking out of your side! A knife, just jammed into the side of you like it had any business being there in the first place! You bled on that thing a lot.”
“Yeah, but only on the black part.” I looked back at Stacy, who seemed like the much more immediate danger. “I got stabbed, if that’s what you’re asking, and it feels sort of like you already knew that before you said anything, so I guess I don’t understand why this has to be some sort of a production when we have other things we need to be worried about right now—”
“I am never going to live in a world where you getting stabbed isn’t something to worry about!” snapped Stacy.
I turned pleadingly to Tybalt. “A little help here?”
“Oh, I think she’s doing quite well without my assistance,” he said. �
�But if you insist, I have never been one to leave a lady fair in distress.”
“See? Even Tybalt thinks you need to worry more about getting actually stabbed.” Stacy jabbed her finger at my chest again. “If you won’t worry about yourself, you shouldn’t be surprised when we do the worrying for you!”
“I’m not surprised,” I sighed. “More just frustrated that you want to focus on this now.”
“She has a point,” said Walther. “Two people are dead.”
“Speaking of dead people, where’s Caitir?” I asked, looking around like our temporarily resident Candela might be crouching in the corner with her Merry Dancers. “Did you wake her up?”
“He did, and she immediately ran off to tell the High King what was going on,” said Raj, sounding incredibly bored with the whole situation, which was apparently not rising to meet his standards for a stirring afternoon. “If you didn’t want him to know that you were causing trouble, you should have asked us to sit on her.”
“I don’t think sitting on a Candela will stop them from opening a doorway into the shadows,” objected Chelsea.
Raj waved a hand, brushing her objections away. “We would have tried, which is more than we did in the absence of instruction.”
“The High King was there when we discovered the Doppelganger, and when we found the traps on Nessa’s room,” I said, more amused than aggravated by his ongoing attempts to be as frustrating as possible. “Pretty sure he already knows I’m causing trouble. Or, well, not causing trouble, but trouble-adjacent once again.”
“That should go on your business cards,” said Quentin.
“We are getting away from the point,” said Stacy, jabbing her finger at me a third time. “You were supposed to be sitting down to a nice, calm, diplomatic dinner with the High King, not causing an inter-Kingdom incident and getting yourself stabbed!”
“It’s a pretty small hole,” I said. “You can stitch it up later, right?”
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